Good to see yellow coloured clothing featuring quite strong on the store! Maybe a yellow labcoat for yourself now, so any yellow solution that some how occurs during reactions, just hold up to your coat and say “trust me it is a clear solution, my coat making is making it look yellow”.
If you want grad school stories, I got burned in grad school literally. I was making an organic reducing agent with an oxioreduction and the flask broke. The neopentane flash ignited and splashed me. Very crappy experience. To add to my crap experience, in the after incident investigation, the police saw a youtube video of me making potassium with a similar method which I developed prior to making my organic intermediate. My PI was not thrilled about me making videos in the lab. Particularly since we were technically a Biology lab even though I am a chemist. The project itself had legitimate aims but I was far more adventurous than I should have been because I was excited about exploring a new use for a little used reduction mechanism. I had dreams of coupling it to a bacterial fermentation - my preliminary trial showed it would beat the snot out of what the Chinese are doing to prepare certain chemicals. Anyway, in the end I graduated and got to be a post-doc. I now have more time to get to enjoy the videos that both of you make - high quality. Not making videos myself anymore. As for chemistry, I think you can try this with a chilled system using a strong vacuum. I didn't check the phase diagram, but I believe the water becomes a relatively more dominant vapor pressure at the lower temperature. You might also be able to use activated magnesium sulfate in an acidic environment in place of phosphorus pentoxide. Much cheaper and easier to prepare. Just dehydrate the store bought heptahydrate and add a touch of sulfuric acid. I will check for a paper because I thought that this was a method before they adopted approachs using quinone preparations with hydrogen and palladium. Magnesium sulfate is also used as a stabilizer at the higher concentrations >90% as well. That may delay ignition but it means jack once the reaction temperature gets to activation and cooks. After all, those sorts of stabilizers only raise the activation barrier in solution, they don't do much once everything goes to the gas phase. If I am wrong about magnesium sulfate, well it shouldn't cost you much in the way of materials. I wouldn't want to make phosphorus pentoxide.... I have fun stories about making phosphorus oxychloride.
As an Australian the part that most resonated with me was having to stop your work in order to remove the snake that has found its way into your living room.
The snake was a missed opportunity. A propers cience and tech VLogger would extend a broomstick, let the snake coil up at him, and surprise the audience with a large open mouth tub of liquid Nitrogen. Then demo how tapping the broomstick yields crackled snake bytes.
When I was in my undergrad, I worked at a hotel to pay the bills. They had an Ozone generator they used to get the smell of smoke out of rooms if someone smoked when they shouldn't. Somehow it was given to a guest who thought they could stay in the room while it ran. It caused the guy to rupture a few blood vessels and spurt blood around the room. Was pretty nuts. Be safe :)
small ozone generators can be used for deodorizing, in human-safe quantities. getting rid of cigarette smoke sounds like it would involve flooding the whole room with the stuff.
E&F: "We're gonna find a safer route" Also E&F: _Bubbles ozone through pure peroxide indoors with a literal hell machine_ (Also congrats on funding your PhD 🙂)
I think what he means is that he went through either his budget for his PhD study project OR went over time (generally 3.5 years) and is no longer getting the scholar ship money (generally lasts 3.5 years) that we Australians get for doing a PhD. Think free money or, ur being extremely underpaid below minimum wage for your work, but its fine and legal cos its not "income" and its a "award". :P
@@martinzhang2226 Oh no, oops!. I rescind my congrats and replace it with an "F" 😂 That's wild, I didn't realize PhD funding would run out so quickly in AU. The PhD students I knew (molecular/cell biology, in the US) were all pushing 6-7 years to finish their degree and still getting funded. I'm not sure how much of that was from the uni and from the PI though, perhaps the PI takes over at some point here in the States. Or maybe just a quirk of bio programs. Still grossly underpaid, practically indentured servitude salary, but at least they got paid.
@Breaking Taps - I'm in a molecular bio program at an R1 research school in the U.S., at least at our institution the University will guarantee funding for 6 years. But, if you are funded directly from the school then you will have to be a teaching assistant to work for that pay (barring you have received some kind of departmental fellowship / award). However if your lab has funding, say a healthy NSF/NIH grant, then you can get a research assistantship instead, which basically just means the PI is paying you directly. Last option is to bring your own funding through external grants/fellowships i.e. the NSF graduate research fellowship program (GRFP).
As for "safer route"... I may have had either a brilliant or a horrifyingly terrible idea for one, and it might even work! If peroxide is soluble in dichloromethane, but water is immiscible with it... what's stopping you from using dichloromethane to do an extraction of hydrogen peroxide (you know, the separatory funnel way - shake repeatedly, let settle, then decant off the aqueous layer), then separating the dichloromethane off from your (now much purer, hopefully) hydrogen peroxide with a regular (or vacuum, idk) distillation? You could recover the DCM after each run, and do repeated extractions on the low-concentration peroxide to extract gradually more and more of it, I think. DCM has a low enough boiling point that should be easy to do w/o decomposing the peroxide, I think. Is there some reason why this doesn't work? Or is mixing DCM + peroxide just a really, really bad idea?
I remember on Mythbusters when they were testing the "Disolving a body in acid" myth, they used Sulfuric acid and one other chemical they wouldn't disclose, Jamie said "let's just say it has a lot of hydrogen and oxygen" and I instantly knew it must be Hydrogen Peroxide. And yep, they were making Piranha Solution! And yep, it turned the pig carcasses into soup!
Ah, the stuff my scientist fried uses to clean some stuff on the nano level.. But earned me would bite through the table and the floor and the floor below that if you spill it.
@1 2 it was 30% or perhaps 15% at the min. If it was the 3% the amount they added would have diluted the solution so much the results seen wouldn't have occured
as far as "bits" go, the baseball* metaphor was a particularly good one, made better by not really knowing at the start whether he was actually going for it or not.
Ah so this is why my high school chemistry teacher was terrified when I explained the minor chemical burns on my fingers as coming from trying to distill 3% H2O2 on the stove with a sauce pan, straws and aluminum foil.
Dude, I was watching a documentary some times back where they said "Slowly decomposing dead cockroaches release SO2 which in turn react to water on surface of sewer walls to form sulfuric acid, which slowly eats the cement and causes collapse of sewer line". Could you check sulfur content of 100gms of cockroaches periplaneta americana or ur local species
@@tobigtobetony9097 big boss the comment section is designed to comment on the video, there are spoilers cause that's kinda the point, don't read comments before you finish the video
I'm glad my cat was a bonafide snake murderer when I lived in Australia. He didn't touch birds cause he grew up around pet ones but boy did he destroy him some snakes and mice. Once he left a dead Taipan on the back lawn that's was scary.
Is that actually possible? Now I'm curious. Edit: Closest thing I found was a theoretical molecule called hexaoxane...disappointing. Not even any double bounds.
The Nazis really knew how to make rockets. Imagine being melted by super concentrated hydrogen peroxide while going supersonic velocities through the sky.
I know nothing about chemistry, but reading the comments is really nice. People giving tips and telling about their own experiences with the compounds that you talk about in the videos, and you answering back. Wholesome :D
The baseball analogy double entendre had me cackling 'you need a license for second base in europe' 'most chemists I know who aren't rocket scientists never get to fourth base'
In Taiwan they sell 50% H2O2 at the chemical store... no idea if it was actually 50% but it does give you a nice burn. Supposedly in the EU they ban those to prevent people from making acetone peroxide or something... but what's the point of those bans when you can buy BIG firecrackers from Poland that can do some serious damage!
I have watched pretty much every video now including Extractions&Ire. They have reminded me why I ever studied chemistry: explosions, poisons and drugs. Yeah doesn't sound too healthy now thinking back... But hell, went on to become a Biotech engineer and there are som pretty radical things going on there too, gene editing and stuff. Maybe more revolutionary at the moment but it's not really in your face in the same way as a good ol' explosion. Well here i am, as a project manager doing fuck all with any of that, but getting payed well. So just became your 666th Patreon, why the hell not.
TH-cam creators really do not get enough credit for their contributions to science education and outreach. I hope at some point organizations like ACS take notice and throw some funds into supporting these channels. When I have a shit day in lab, It is humbling to come back and watch a video of you synthesizing cubane in a shed with pool chemicals. On top of this, you manage to do it while making the video genuinely entertaining and accessible to everyone. Like holy shit, the dedication is unmatched. I have huge respect for you, and content like this reminds me how much I love what I do. Thanks for all of your awesome content and best of luck with your PhD!
I think back to my younger years, when information came only as fast as I could read, write, take notes and walk back and forth to the library. Now we can tune it to countless other problem solvers, to share and learn with, that for quite a while just did not exist in my world!
Nah the scientific community is to focused on only funding programs that can make them more money, monopolize colleges or get more woke or focused on green greed (climate science) or going “green”
@@stormbreaker170 I also wish universities didn't spend money on trying to stop climate change and reduce our reliability on the finite supply of crude oil
We had an incident at work with some 3rd base H2O2, I think it was like 45%. Container leaked on a girl who wasn't paying a lick of attention to it. Literally right after being briefed on the dangers of hazmat spills. Started melting skin within 5 minutes and started oxidizing the concrete it fell on almost immediately. I legit feel like some of your channel could be real useful in industrial settings.
I work in liquid rocketry and have used 90% for rockety purposes. With a team won a $1M prize building a hovering peroxide rocket. If you want to make peroxide again consider trying sparging, it is often used rather than vacuum distillation. Dry gas is bubbled through the liquid and will make the water evaporate faster; industrially this is done closed loop with a dryer but for a small batch you could do it open loop with a nitrogen tank. Phosphoric acid is a stabilizer for peroxide, it will poison catalysts. If you want the most reactive HTP, I'd keep it away. You can demonstrate this by putting some silver in peroxide, unstabilized peroxide will bubble until it all reacts, while stabilized peroxide will eventually poison the catalyst and stop reacting. The main reason normal distillation isn't used isn't just because the peroxide will break down faster, but that peroxide vapor is detonable. There are many stories of people blowing up their glassware trying to distill peroxide. I don't know if there's a good way to demonstrate that, but if anyone can find a way it's you. HTP will ignite itself on contact with some substances, so if you do this again you might look for some of those rather than doing ones you have to light. Pine cones are quite reactive. Leather is very reactive, dripping some peroxide on shoes is a common way to demonstrate why you have to have the proper PPE. Hydrazine hydrate is hypergolic with HTP, as are a few other strange fuels.
@@Beregorn88 I don't know, I haven't tried it. Usually they're used in very different molecules, like alcohol vs. water. Peroxide is close enough in size to water that I don't think the usual 4 angstrom sieves would work.
I've used lots of H202 for my plants actually, it's great! It kills soil dwelling pests, and can also revive dying plants by giving oxygen to the root zone. Had an orange tree I was sure to be dead, so I tried the H202. A week later I started seeing shoots from the root zone, I was utterly amazed. H202 is a great tool for gardeners 👍
What concentration do you use for treating plants? Unfortunately here in Germany anyone asking for Hydrogenperoxide more concentrated than 5% or so is considered a terrorist trying to make a bomb. Sellers are even obliged to report suspicious customers. So always shave before buying chemical supplies.
@@MetalheadAndNerd I wouldn't think it would be much higher than 5%. Granted, this is also the first I am hearing of this. From my own ventures into soil chemistry, I would caution a bit against too much oxygen in the soil. But that gets into a whole enormous field of study of soil types, plant root systems, chemistry, etc. For example, my blueberries can't survive in alkaline soil - they can't absorb nutrients in the soil without it being fairly acidic. Other plants do just fine in alkaline soil - mulberries, for example, are quite happy in alkaline soil and tend to make it more so. Strawberries prefer acidic soil, blackberries don't care and some varieties are downright invasive... Legumes have a bacteria companion which fixes large amounts of nitrogen to the soil (nitrates) from nitric acid in the rain (which is why catalytic converters are a mistake - that is plant food we are destroying at a time when the rains are becoming less nutritious). But that actually can make the soil too nitrogen rich and will impair or even kill tomatoes/solanacae family plants (eggplant, tobacco, nightshade, potatoes). Garlic and onions release a chemical that kills that bacterium. My point is that dumping peroxide on your soil is probably a situational or niche treatment.
@@Aim54Delta 5% ist enough to completely bleach black mold within less than a minute so I would assume that this concentration is pretty aggressive to organic material.
I was just googling this topic yesterday and then you release this! Tom, for some reason I find your channel oddly relaxing, not sure that I should given the topics lol. Keep up the great work!
You're relaxing because the back of your mind knows that you're watching this video *because* he survived.... (At least that's the only way I can find to rationalize it) :P
12:53 It's because you need the ions from H2O. I remember a story told by a professor about grad students who broke a bottle of concentrated acid on a linoleum floor. They thought the best thing was to dilute it with water. When they poured the water onto the spilled acid, the acid began reacting vigorously with the flooring.
It's generally not a good idea to pour water into concentrated acid period. The best thing to do in that situation would be to neutralize it with a base, such as sodium bicarbonate.
@@Owen_loves_Butters A closet with 1 gallon of fuming concentrated acid, how many mols do you think you would need of that sodium bicarbonate? And how many mols of CO2 is going to be produced? What do you think their chance of survival is? They will pass out face first into a pool of acid and die of asphyxiation. Good thinking, genius.
@@fgvcosmic6752 It would, but the acid would react with the base more than anything else present, say the floor. If there's enough base to neutralize the acid, the floor might not even get damaged much at all.
@@gregoryford2532 Carbonic acid is not stable and would rapidly break down almost entirely into water and carbon dioxide. Any common base, such as any alkali hydroxide, alkali carbonate, or alkali bicarbonate, will form water when reacted with most acids.
"I'm gonna use an analagy... baseball" Me, who knows nothing about baseball: "Well at least I have a chemistry degree and already know how peroxide works"
I remember as a kid getting some 50% H2O2 for my birthday, loads of fun :) One of the first things I did was put way too much in a volumetric flask (Yeah, I know, I was a kid, and it was one of the two treasured pieces of second hand "proper" glassware I owned), then dump a bunch of manganese dioxide in it to see how vigorously it would decompose compared to the 3% I'd previously experimented with. The answer was very. Everyone's seen the "elephant's toothpaste", but this was more the "elephant's boiling explosive diarrhea". I sometimes wonder if the stains are still on the roof of my childhood shed/lab...
4:53 Fun language fact: East Asian languages also got a suffix for element names, and it is used like '-ium' in many English element names. In Korean/Japanese Oxygen (with its etymology related to 'acid producer') becomes 'san(acid)-so' - with its 'acid' part being a homonym with the word 'mountain'. Meanwhile, in Korean the suffix 'so' also has a homonym; it is '*cow*'. Ergo, 'spherical oxygen in a vacuum' written in Korean pays better respect to its reference than the original English phrase; it's a homonym to 'a spherical *mountain cow* in a vacuum'. also carbon is a homonym to 'burnt cow', hydrogen to 'bull(male cow)', and nitrogen to '*vagina* cow'. Ammonia is a foursome.
why do people have to have indigenous words for everything. not meant to offend u germans do the same. what the actual fk is "wasserstoff" just say hydrogen
@@CimboAkinci the German chemical industry was for a long time the largest in the world, until they fucked over their reputation, so you could ask why we don't call it wasserstoff in English.
2:17 "In addition to [the main rocket] propellants, there were other tanks filled with hydrogen peroxide. [This] substance was similar to the hydrogen peroxide that you might find in any medicine cabinet, however the concentration of our peroxide was 50 times that of the peroxide for household use. That stuff was really volatile. It was comparable to nitroglycerine in terms of instability. The older mechanics used to impress the new mechanics by throwing a cup full of that peroxide on a sagebush. The bush would explode in flames. One good quality of hydrogen peroxide is that it gives a warning before it explodes. It gets hot and gives off a pungent odor. When we smelled hot peroxide, we got the hell out of there" - Milton Thompson in At the Edge of Space (p. 75), referring to the high-test peroxide used by the X-15 for its reaction control system and APUs.
If you like stories about chemistry in that vein I can highly recommend "Ignition" by John D. Clarke. It's about all the different (insane) kinds of rocket fuel people have experimented with throughout the history of rockets. And it is fucking hilarious!
@@Dr_Mauser Well all the new players use methane and oxygen because it has better specific impulse. The space shuttle used hydrogen and oxygen which has even better specific impulse, but liquid hydrogen is "financially troublesome". But a lot of what was learned is still used in other applications than main thrust. Many reaction control thrusters still use the hydrazine derivatives for instance. Emergency power is still generated with hydrogen peroxide, etc. But a lot of that shit is simply to dangerous to handle by the hundreds of tons...
This one time, I bought a commercially-available ozone generator for deodorizing rooms. (This one used a UVC lamp in a metal enclosure to generate the ozone, rather than high voltage). Somewhere along the line, I *seriously* fucked up the math, and ended up with an ozone generator that was built for a room ten times the size of the ones I was deodorizing. My point is that I understood exactly what you meant by the radiation thing. If you ask me, high concentrations of ozone smell exactly like what they're doing chemically: they smell like they're oxidizing (translation: chemically burning) the lining of your nasal cavity.
Worked with a Co-60 sterilizer array, when the elements were out of the water doing their work killing everything in the bunker the whole building would reek of ozone death even with strong forced ventilation
We use an ozone generator (i believe) in the ER to decontaminate Covid rooms (rooms that held a covid patient). I love the smell personally 😂😂😂 probably not a good thing. If i have time, and a previous smelly patient experience, I’ll deodorize the room with it just cause
I've spent the last week being lazy not taking of my own shit but just seeing you do your thing motivates me to keep working on my own! Thanks for the motivation and the amazing Chemistry content I love it man!!
I love Australian and UK based accents cause of how much the slang makes it sound unprofessional lol. You just have an Australian doctorate-level chemist going "aw fuck, my benzine's munted." It's a lovely contrast.
@@dmacpher I'm in the UK. I crashed my bike the other day, twice, and had to go to the doctor (the next day). When I told him I'd crashed my bike twice on the same day he actually said 'Fuck off!??' It was the funniest and most unprofessional comment I've ever heard from a doctor and made me lol 😂
One of my favorite compounds. For years I have concentrated it by putting 3% H2O2 into a beaker and submerging it in a crock pot full of 60ºC water. Gently evaporate the water off of it. Wondered for years why the metal tools in the garage around it were rusting...
I love you're quote of "ozone smells like a lethal dose of radiation feels." Got a few good kicks of 16% ozone in the face in grad school. Cures hangovers. Opening an O3 bar in Vegas.
@@ephjaymusic I'd be more afraid of the electricities to be honest, I struggled for about 3 years to get to 16% and all it did was oxidize the iron in my bloodstream so I spit up a little rust.
Ah, concentrated hydrogen peroxide. I was using some of that back in uni and didn't realize I had a small tear in my glove. I ended up with a bleached fingertip. I didn't even feel it at the time, but boy did it itch while healing. And that was no where near rocket fuel levels!
I was so impressed about the 95% purity, which not even rockets use as 70% is good enough for an oxidizer + pressure source, that when he was like "Let's make H2O3" I was in disbelief
In undergrad lab we made a really cool complex that models galactose oxidase and can selectively oxidize an alcohol to an aldehyde. As a byproduct hydrogen peroxide gets generated. It was possible to do this reaction in a pure alcohol that corresponds to a volatile aldehyde (methanol for example) and generate water free H2O2. If anyone wants to see the structure, here is the SMILES: CC(C)(C)C1=CC(N2C3=C(O[Cu]2([N](CC)(CC)CC)O4)C(C(C)(C)C)=CC(C(C)(C)C)=C3)=C4C(C(C)(C)C)=C1 one Oxygen is a ketyl-radical.
@@LuisBorja1981 I will dig it up later. My prof was actually in the group that made it and the patent got sold to degussa, one of the biggest producers of H2O2 (in Germany?). But it seems like it doesn't get used in industry.
A tip I have learned. I am far from a chemist but I work with 40 percent peroxide for work. It likes to decompose to oxygen and water with heat and uv. So perhaps keeping it cool and dark would speed up drying?
We’re working on making a HTP (98% peroxide) and RP1 (refined kerosene) fueled rocket in my university’s liquid rocket club. Cool to see what goes into making higher concentrations. I’m glad we can just buy our stuff and not have to make it, granted it is expensive af
@@ExplosionsAndFire "The first, and absolutely most indispensable, piece of safety equipment you'll mount is a pair of well fitting high traction running shoes."
@@andersjjensen I will draw your attention to a quote “It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.” ― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants Alas I can't remember exactly what the chemical was though I do recall its a yellow abomination. And one of the most horrific chemicals known to man.
@@JcPepin That's the badger! Absolutely horrific stuff. Anything that can set fire to concrete and asbestos on contact is NOT your friend. Oh, and glass too I believe...
A really scuffed way of concentrating the peroxide would be to run the ozone generator through the low percentage peroxide. Therefore producing more total peroxide than you started with.
@@dc-gs3ld ACTUALLY - wait a minute bucko that'd actually work for vacuum distillation. As long as it can stay cool, Ether and Salt can be used to separate out water and hydrogen peroxide for ether distillation. That would actually work really well, like 80% - 90% concentration well. Scuffed strategy FTW 👍
@@sulli1189 could you explain to us non-chemists what you're talking about. Because to me it sounds like you're planning to mix a fuel (ether) with a oxidizer (peroxide) in a reaction that can create heat.
@@caseyb1346 I've never heard of anyone doing it because it's insane but it should make the peroxide form a layer outside of the water, the problem is after that happens it would possibly form a hypergol or some other horrifying thing, apparently in an environment with no oxygen it wouldn't be a problem but it's still, a disturbing thought
@@caseyb1346 YES! You are correct and That's why it's Scuffed. You don't want to do this. Though in Hypothesis I'm pretty sure the ignition wouldn't be instant and the method could work if kept under ether/alcohol's ignition temperature as well as the peroxide's decomposition temperature. The Salt however is unknown to be an inhibitor or catalyst. The hope is that instead of removing the water through expensive/long acting "desiccants" (water absorbing compounds), We could instead instantly separate a majority of the water by changing it's buoyancy due to the fact that saltwater and alcohol act like water and oil and so separate from each other. That's an old trick for concentrating alcohol but it makes the alcohol salty. That method only makes sense because the combination of Hydrogen Peroxide being more soluble in Alcohol and ether -Plus that Alcohol and Ether can be distilled faster than water at a lower temperature. It wouldn't be the purest if it works, but it would be a fast way to concentrate a portion of the peroxide into the 80's and 90's range as the alcohol will also be in the 90% using the salt method. It's honestly safer to concentrate the peroxide by making more of it, but if this method works it would be Fast. I hope that I got this down in proper laymen because it's how I prefer to explain this stuff. Edit: After a bit of reading, Hydrogen peroxide should be safely soluble in chilled Alcohol and Ether, It apparently isn't Hypergolic and requires a catalyst of pure metals or organic phosphoric compounds (like cell wall lipids) to react as such. Salt also seems to be neutral to hydrogen peroxide but that's more anecdotal. This may not be as scuffed as I had first thought...
The best part is the clueless friend that pushes you to go further without even realizing what you are doing. The type of person who will happily take credit for your accomplishments for being your inspiration...so they kinda deserve it. A friend you don't like but can never hate
so glad you started uploading again, and hopefully a lot more too! idk how you dont have millions of subs yet, literally the best science youtuber on the whole website.
"I think you can still go to third base in Europe if you've got a licence but I don't know" is perhaps the single best ex+f quote ever, likewise 'most chemists will never make it to 4th base'
Yeah. Some ADHD friends and I were going to take over the world, came up with an outline of a plan. And everything. Then we figured out that it was I who had forgetten the chips. Benzo was gonna' bring dip but found something far more interesting. We debated that for a while. This is a cool channel!
You’re an Incredible Mad Genius. Thank you from the nameless hoards of chemistry deamons for the Time and Sanity you spend giving us excellent content. I Love the dedication to “The Bit”. Follow it through til The End.
As a grad student working in a propulsion lab I've heard the horror stories and seen the footage of catastrophic failed tests using 89% peroxide in hybrid motors. That stuff is no joke, and I'm a little glad I'm not handling it!
I missed ya buddy. When I feel down in the lab, I put on a video of you and I can feel happy that: A. I don't have to work with whatever abomination you are cooking. B. Start to reappreciate my PPE and fume hood. C. See that even when a situation is confusing, determination is often the key to succes. It takes skill to play the clown of the circus. You're appreciated👍🏻
I was a bit nervous watching that xylene burning on top of the high strength peroxide. Flammable solvents which are miscible with the peroxide are one thing, but those that float on top of it are a completely different story. I'll let the venerable old John Drury Clark (author of Ignition!) explain why: "A broken missile on deck - or any sort of shipboard accident that brought fuel and acid together - would inevitably start a fire. On the other hand, they reasoned that jet fuel wouldn't even mix with peroxide, but would just float on top of it, doing nothing. And if, somehow, it caught fire, it might be possible to put it out - with foam perhaps - without too much trouble. So, at NARTS we tried it. A few drums of peroxide (about 55 gallons per drum) were poured out into a big pan, a drum or two of JP-4 was floated on top, and the whole thing touched off. The results were unspectacular. The JP burned quietly, with occasional patches of flare or fizz burning. And the fire chief moved in with his men and his foam and put the whole thing out without any fuss. End of exercise. The Lord had his hands on our heads that day - the firemen, a couple of dozen bystanders, and me. For when we - and other people - tried it again (fortunately on a smaller scale) the results were different. The jet fuel burns quietly at first, then the flare burning starts coming, and its frequency increases. (That's the time to start running.) Then, as the layer of JP gets thinner, the peroxide underneath gets warmer, and starts to boil and decompose, and the overlying fuel is permeated with oxygen and peroxide vapor. And then the whole shebang detonates, with absolutely shattering violence." Of course a few mL in a petri dish is probably not going to cause a huge explosion. But if it did detonate, it would be enough to shatter the dish and send broken glass flying at high velocity in unpredictable directions. So still not to be sniffed at!
"Sometimes you get so caught up in avoiding bad scenarios and surviving a procedure, that you don't actually stop and think, "what is the good scenario?"" I laughed so hard. And when he started trying to make H2O3 I was like, "Oh, this man wants to die."
Cheers for giving me something INTERESTING to watch on TH-cam. This is the first really good vid I have watched for years. Great channel and fantastic experiments. I have a DIY vaccum chamber and some 11% peroxide, and I wanna do a project with my daughter where we purify it and use it for elephants toothpaste (and some other stuff). I have conc sulphuric acid, epsom salts, and I suppose I could dry out loads of copper sulphate and try that as a dessicant. I'm looking forward to testing the purity too. Thanks again, mate. VERY entertaining and informative. (EDIT - sorry found the answer to my question. You already answered it, and I wasn't paying attention).
You have no idea how many interrogatons my chem teachers have undergone thanks to the chaos/work of this man. I am banned from brining up the name Jahn Teller (shiller of metals)
Ah damn, I thought your line about P2O5 being expensive would lead into showing us how you can source it cheaply (like what you did with CCl4; "impossible to get... I found some"). 😭
Fun fact Sodium polyacrylate superabsorbent (SAP) absorb 30% H2O2, i tested it then forgot about the beaker and one month later i was left with a strange goo which i suspected to be highly enriched in Peroxide (dried SAP doesnt do that with simple water). Fearing it was a fire hazard, i immediatly soaked it with water but i still regret not burning some to test it.
Brings back memories.... Ah, the good old days of the 1990s, before the Department of Homeland Security Theater and its arcane restrictions - "Some quantities, concentrations, and uses of hydrogen peroxide require personnel with special clearance, but you're not allowed to know who needs the special clearance unless you already have the special clearance." I was working (after a fashion) with a group that was using ~85% peroxide in multi-liter quantities. Start with commercial 50%, bought by the drum-full, and... well, the peroxide guy was using a variety of methods for concentrating the stuff. Last I was involved with the group, he was experimenting with sparging - instead of waiting for the water to evaporate into dry air, the plan was to blow dry air through the liquid to carry off the water. Never thought of blowing dry ozone through it, but he was just crazy enough he might have tried that one had it been suggested. I seem to recall that there was commercial 85% available at the time, but only in rail-car lots, and the group's budget didn't extend to that sort of quantity, not to mention the trouble and expense of having a rail line run out to the remote test facility. And, yes, getting a drop of the concentrated stuff on one's skin is painful.
I miss those days. Was able to get gallons of 35% no questions asked. Worked great for stripping metal from gold using a but of HCl added. Was so much better than alternatives for this task. 🤓
I love your content man. The way you present information is very relatable, understandable and approachable. Your calling in life is, in my humble opinion, as a teacher. You're amazing at it!
I just spent the better part of a month diving down rabbit holes while perfecting a current regulating circuit only to return to the main project I built it for and realize I don't need it, so there's that.
I've done vacuum distillation at home to over 90% over 20 years ago using an incandescent light bulb as the heat source and starting with 50% food grade H202. Purity and cleanliness are key and it's quite hard to keep 90%+ from decomposing on its own, but the harder challenge is keeping a strong enough vacuum to bring the boiling point down to under 40C.
I made copper carbonate for a video, for the first time in years, and when I went to calculate the final yield I ended up with a greater than 100% yield. Even after drying in a desiccator. I almost uploaded the video the other day to ask what I did wrong until I realized during editing, I made a really stupid and amateur mistake while calculating the stoichiometry. Needless to say, I'm sticking to practical chemistry until I get back into the chemistry groove lol. I've been doing mycology and biology so much the past few years, my chemistry skills have degraded very badly xb. Oh well.
I think 4'th base is 50%, which you can get for agricultural purposes and buy over the counter at hydroponics stores. Same chemical burns as 3'rd base in my experience, with the added fun that if you put it close to a naked flame after a few seconds of heating the naked flame suddenly gets a lot bigger as the H2O2 decomposes. Maybe 5'th base is for HTP edit: OK 2 minutes later I see you already know this and I'm a dumb dumb
These are some nice peroxide crystals. Reminds me of chemistry horror stories of the "Things I won't work with" variety (not sure if it was actually there) where the author was explaining how over long stretches of time pure peroxide crystals form in untouched containers, and referenced a story about a few BARRELS of the stuff that were discovered, untouched for a couple of decades and with nice, big crystals floating in them, in a basement in a heavily populated city. That must've been fun. Although as not a chemist I never fully grasped just how dangerous they are. Shame you didn't have enough concentrated peroxide to grow bigger crystals and show us their energetic nature, but on the other hand I like you being alive m8.
This is truly one of the most enjoyable chemistry channels to watch on TH-cam, and I watch a lot of chemistry videos. So much so that my friends and family have grown concerned.
That last bit had me crying from laughing so hard. I work with an ozone generator daily so I've become paranoid and smell it even when I'm not at work so that description was fantastic
The amount of work you put into each intro and your comical ad libs along with carrying the mic like a classic chemist at an event teaching a college course. Your channel is top tier platinum. And also where I've learned to make all sorts of explosives or atleadt the chemistry of :D
As a rocket nerd, even before the video starts I am hyped as hell to watch some High-Test Peroxide chemistry! Let me share with you _my_ understanding of modern HTP rocketry: back in the day, the U.S. Air Force wanted to know whether it was a suitable propellant, so they put a bunch of it in a sealed container in the middle of the desert, it exploded, and they vowed never to use it again (instead using much safer chemicals like Inhibited Red Fuming Nitric Acid and Nitrogen Tetroxide). The RAF already used peroxide decomposition in rocket-boosted fighter planes, so their only orbital rocket used HTP and Kerosene, a mixture which had the advantage of being hypergolic without being carcinogenic (relatively speaking). But then Parliament killed that project, the U.S. used Hydrazine and N2O4 until solid rockets became the de-facto western ICBM choice, and then mostly fueled their orbital rockets with kerosene and liquid oxygen, unless they really needed to throw money at either the defense industry (solid rockets) or cryogenics engineers with too much time on their hands (liquid hydrogen). But now we're all transitioning to liquid oxygen and liquid methane, which sounds like a terrible environmental choice until you realize the existing options were 1) kerosene and 2) hydrogen made from cracking methane anyways. And maybe we'll make it via the Sabatier process someday. Promise. Maybe. EDIT: There I am, Gary, there I am! Also, jesus christ, you want to go even further beyond?
Great video! We are actually concentrating about 100 ml of 85-88% hydrogen peroxide each month in our lab using vacuum distillation (personally, I've been oxidizing some electron deficient tetrazines lately). It is pretty safe if you use a thermostat to keep everything below 50 degrees C. Greetings from Russia
My dad send me this video to watch since I’m doing a chemistry related degree currently. So interesting yet comedic. I’m so surprised you’re not in the millions when it comes to followers!
my grandmother works at a hydrogen peroxide purification plant, they have 4 vacuum distillers. they ship out train takers full of 99% pure hydrogen peroxide
As a 3d animator who knows diddly squat about chemistry, I gotta admit I watched every single one of your videos and regret nothing. You dumb it down to keywords even I understand and when thing go boom it makes me happy. Really love the content. Glad you're back. Keep up that good shite mate 👌
Also my first merch is here! explosionsandfire.myspreadshop.com/ Make cool references no-one else will understand!
Don't know how wide my tits are in inches sorry, I'd get me a hoodie otherwise. Measuring is a man's job
Speaking of cool references no one will understand - I think a "Tar! 🎉🎉" shirt would be sick and I'd buy it instantly
Quite expensive for us aussies, but a small price to pay for e&f merchandise!
@@fmontanari that's so interesting considering he's Australian too? I wonder why it's not an aussie site? What's the shipping like?
Good to see yellow coloured clothing featuring quite strong on the store!
Maybe a yellow labcoat for yourself now, so any yellow solution that some how occurs during reactions, just hold up to your coat and say “trust me it is a clear solution, my coat making is making it look yellow”.
You need to be like me and quit grad school to make internet videos!!!
I just won't check to see when my final exams are and see how that works out for me
If you want grad school stories, I got burned in grad school literally. I was making an organic reducing agent with an oxioreduction and the flask broke. The neopentane flash ignited and splashed me. Very crappy experience. To add to my crap experience, in the after incident investigation, the police saw a youtube video of me making potassium with a similar method which I developed prior to making my organic intermediate. My PI was not thrilled about me making videos in the lab. Particularly since we were technically a Biology lab even though I am a chemist. The project itself had legitimate aims but I was far more adventurous than I should have been because I was excited about exploring a new use for a little used reduction mechanism. I had dreams of coupling it to a bacterial fermentation - my preliminary trial showed it would beat the snot out of what the Chinese are doing to prepare certain chemicals. Anyway, in the end I graduated and got to be a post-doc. I now have more time to get to enjoy the videos that both of you make - high quality. Not making videos myself anymore.
As for chemistry, I think you can try this with a chilled system using a strong vacuum. I didn't check the phase diagram, but I believe the water becomes a relatively more dominant vapor pressure at the lower temperature. You might also be able to use activated magnesium sulfate in an acidic environment in place of phosphorus pentoxide. Much cheaper and easier to prepare. Just dehydrate the store bought heptahydrate and add a touch of sulfuric acid. I will check for a paper because I thought that this was a method before they adopted approachs using quinone preparations with hydrogen and palladium. Magnesium sulfate is also used as a stabilizer at the higher concentrations >90% as well. That may delay ignition but it means jack once the reaction temperature gets to activation and cooks. After all, those sorts of stabilizers only raise the activation barrier in solution, they don't do much once everything goes to the gas phase.
If I am wrong about magnesium sulfate, well it shouldn't cost you much in the way of materials. I wouldn't want to make phosphorus pentoxide.... I have fun stories about making phosphorus oxychloride.
You quit a PhD for youtube, Nile? Or a Masters?
what’re you uploading next mr red
where are the 1 hour long videos bro? i need my fix.
"Get the snake out of the house."
Aye. Easily the most important step in Peroxide concentration.
can't make peroxide when ya dead
Snake was probably stealing your reagents, anyway. Show that bugger the door.
Meh, there is probably a big bloody Huntsman spider in the house somewhere.
Let that one deal with the snake.
@@ExplosionsAndFire Technically, you can. You just have to ingest the correct chemicals before getting bitten by the snake.
@@ExplosionsAndFire CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
You know you're an amazing chemist when you get 102% purified solutions.
If you get 102% of anything, then you know you're shit at math.
@@DoctressCalibrator I mean, 1 Volt to 2.02 Volt is like, 102-ish percent? Dunno, I am bad at math.
@@MazeFrame That is 202%
102% would be 1.02 volts
@@anjhindul it is a 102% increase tho
@@charliefranklin8523 you are right. have you ever thought about creating a perpetuum mobile?
As an Australian the part that most resonated with me was having to stop your work in order to remove the snake that has found its way into your living room.
That and the game of baseball which instantly evolved into cricket
try finding one in your couch
@@davidconner-shover51 found one under my bed once... mf was quiet as.
Found a couple behind the toilet one night, harmless corn snakes but it'll make your ass a titanium cutter
The snake was a missed opportunity. A propers cience and tech VLogger would extend a broomstick, let the snake coil up at him, and surprise the audience with a large open mouth tub of liquid Nitrogen. Then demo how tapping the broomstick yields crackled snake bytes.
When I was in my undergrad, I worked at a hotel to pay the bills. They had an Ozone generator they used to get the smell of smoke out of rooms if someone smoked when they shouldn't. Somehow it was given to a guest who thought they could stay in the room while it ran. It caused the guy to rupture a few blood vessels and spurt blood around the room. Was pretty nuts. Be safe :)
ohh yeah. would rather not have my blood rupture across the room. that's one of my least favourite things to happen
small ozone generators can be used for deodorizing, in human-safe quantities. getting rid of cigarette smoke sounds like it would involve flooding the whole room with the stuff.
Guest relations got a call, didn't they?
I've used one in a used car I got that smelled funny. Let it run for a few hours while I was at work and it did the job quite well
@@graealex nitric oxide is a based chemical tbh
So all I need is Phosphorus pentoxide, hail and a snake in my house, got it!
Yeah and kill some tomatoes while you are at it!
💥 👍👍👍
🍅👎
Tomatoes in piranha solution sounds fun
Phosphorus pentoxide is disgusting!
😍 I just came to this video from your steam engine video! Love those YT crossovers
Can you 3D print the snake?
E&F: "We're gonna find a safer route"
Also E&F: _Bubbles ozone through pure peroxide indoors with a literal hell machine_
(Also congrats on funding your PhD 🙂)
I am the 1000 on this comment. I have never been so lucky
I think what he means is that he went through either his budget for his PhD study project OR went over time (generally 3.5 years) and is no longer getting the scholar ship money (generally lasts 3.5 years) that we Australians get for doing a PhD. Think free money or, ur being extremely underpaid below minimum wage for your work, but its fine and legal cos its not "income" and its a "award". :P
@@martinzhang2226 Oh no, oops!. I rescind my congrats and replace it with an "F" 😂
That's wild, I didn't realize PhD funding would run out so quickly in AU. The PhD students I knew (molecular/cell biology, in the US) were all pushing 6-7 years to finish their degree and still getting funded. I'm not sure how much of that was from the uni and from the PI though, perhaps the PI takes over at some point here in the States. Or maybe just a quirk of bio programs.
Still grossly underpaid, practically indentured servitude salary, but at least they got paid.
@Breaking Taps - I'm in a molecular bio program at an R1 research school in the U.S., at least at our institution the University will guarantee funding for 6 years. But, if you are funded directly from the school then you will have to be a teaching assistant to work for that pay (barring you have received some kind of departmental fellowship / award). However if your lab has funding, say a healthy NSF/NIH grant, then you can get a research assistantship instead, which basically just means the PI is paying you directly. Last option is to bring your own funding through external grants/fellowships i.e. the NSF graduate research fellowship program (GRFP).
As for "safer route"... I may have had either a brilliant or a horrifyingly terrible idea for one, and it might even work!
If peroxide is soluble in dichloromethane, but water is immiscible with it... what's stopping you from using dichloromethane to do an extraction of hydrogen peroxide (you know, the separatory funnel way - shake repeatedly, let settle, then decant off the aqueous layer), then separating the dichloromethane off from your (now much purer, hopefully) hydrogen peroxide with a regular (or vacuum, idk) distillation? You could recover the DCM after each run, and do repeated extractions on the low-concentration peroxide to extract gradually more and more of it, I think. DCM has a low enough boiling point that should be easy to do w/o decomposing the peroxide, I think.
Is there some reason why this doesn't work? Or is mixing DCM + peroxide just a really, really bad idea?
I remember on Mythbusters when they were testing the "Disolving a body in acid" myth, they used Sulfuric acid and one other chemical they wouldn't disclose, Jamie said "let's just say it has a lot of hydrogen and oxygen" and I instantly knew it must be Hydrogen Peroxide. And yep, they were making Piranha Solution! And yep, it turned the pig carcasses into soup!
Did they mention that bodies dissolved even easier in strong bases?
Ah, the stuff my scientist fried uses to clean some stuff on the nano level.. But earned me would bite through the table and the floor and the floor below that if you spill it.
@1 2 it was 30% or perhaps 15% at the min. If it was the 3% the amount they added would have diluted the solution so much the results seen wouldn't have occured
@@__lasevix_ added bonus it turns all the fat it soap
@@GundamReviver sounds like chlorine trifluoride to me
"most chemists wont ever make it to fourth base"
Wise words
😔
Shoulda worked with rockets, red ones 🚀 💦
unless the chemists go on a do it vacation to a red light district and pay for fourth base
yeah he really decided to roast us with that line
as far as "bits" go, the baseball* metaphor was a particularly good one, made better by not really knowing at the start whether he was actually going for it or not.
My husband is a chemist and could relate to the burn of high percentage hydrogen peroxide. He has never, however, achieved a 102% solution.
You gotta go to the inverted lab to get that last 2%.
102% H2O2: sequel to sequel to water.
skill issue
@@Flesh_Wizard H₂O₃ - a trilogy!
Only a guy who wrote "pirahna" dozen times can achieve 102%. Someone just arrest him. He's a public safety risk.
Ah so this is why my high school chemistry teacher was terrified when I explained the minor chemical burns on my fingers as coming from trying to distill 3% H2O2 on the stove with a sauce pan, straws and aluminum foil.
😂
I have also done this
I want you to know I had a visceral almost fight or flight reaction to reading your comment. It presented like a strange mix between a gasp and a gag
did it work?
@@tearex1637 can i do the same with hydrazine?
Dude, I was watching a documentary some times back where they said "Slowly decomposing dead cockroaches release SO2 which in turn react to water on surface of sewer walls to form sulfuric acid, which slowly eats the cement and causes collapse of sewer line". Could you check sulfur content of 100gms of cockroaches periplaneta americana or ur local species
Thats sound super interesting, this is why i love watching science ytb. I learn even in he comments
It's basically forming acid rain inside the sewer.
Interesting… Now I have a cheap and viable source for sulfuric acid…
@@bonbonpony its the weaker sulfuric acid (sulphurous acid) and it decomposes easily and its weak so no use.
@@mrocelot1420 It compromises concrete, so that could be considered a use.
Glad you're back man! Shame about the peroxide decomposing that quickly though, would've loved to see what the hell H2O3 can do
Yeah honestly. Seems like scope for a re-match later on
Spoilers!!
@@ExplosionsAndFire use ice bath or something so it doesn't decompose design better ozone generate or use microwave transformer
@@tobigtobetony9097 big boss the comment section is designed to comment on the video, there are spoilers cause that's kinda the point, don't read comments before you finish the video
@@ExplosionsAndFire YYYYEEEAAAAH
"Get the snake out of the house"
The most Australian thing I've heard in a chemistry video
I'm glad my cat was a bonafide snake murderer when I lived in Australia. He didn't touch birds cause he grew up around pet ones but boy did he destroy him some snakes and mice.
Once he left a dead Taipan on the back lawn that's was scary.
10:19 if anyone needs it
Next make Ozene, like Benzene but oxygen instead of carbon, complete the cycle (literally)
Is that the crazy uncle of ozone?
Never heard of anything sounding more like a bomb than that.
Is that actually possible? Now I'm curious.
Edit: Closest thing I found was a theoretical molecule called hexaoxane...disappointing. Not even any double bounds.
Sounds like a cool explosive. Im in!
Is... is that even chemically possible..?
It's kind of fun how you can see that, as the concentration goes up, it doesn't just become a better oxidizer, it becomes a _cleaner_ oxidizer too.
The Nazis really knew how to make rockets. Imagine being melted by super concentrated hydrogen peroxide while going supersonic velocities through the sky.
Only a guy who wrote "pirahna" dozen times can achieve 102%. Someone just arrest him. He's a public safety risk.
I know nothing about chemistry, but reading the comments is really nice. People giving tips and telling about their own experiences with the compounds that you talk about in the videos, and you answering back. Wholesome :D
what the fuck. i go from doc spawnpeeking someone with a huge mp5 to seeing you here
Daddy hoot when more siege vids? please Father
Hey hoot have you ever heard of hoof
Surprised to see you here tovarisch
oh wow - you DO interact w/ people outside of R6 then... gotta rethink my opinion about the deep voice w/ a nice sense of humor :)
The baseball analogy double entendre had me cackling 'you need a license for second base in europe' 'most chemists I know who aren't rocket scientists never get to fourth base'
@Dave Smith Yes I do but I believe I quoted from the video directly but I might have misheard
I liked the visual of a cricket match when talking about baseball 🤣
In Taiwan they sell 50% H2O2 at the chemical store... no idea if it was actually 50% but it does give you a nice burn.
Supposedly in the EU they ban those to prevent people from making acetone peroxide or something... but what's the point of those bans when you can buy BIG firecrackers from Poland that can do some serious damage!
it's a triple entendre.
I know. I’m fourteen on the inside.😊
"Spherical oxygen in a vacuum"
Thanks for making the applied maths person feel included.
Proof oxygen isn't flat! It's a sphere!
Spherical + vacuum + no air resistance + no gravity + at STP + in most common isotope
🤣
@@liamernst9626 At standard temperature and pressure in a vacuum?
@@Dogedows the only thing that is flat is the universe
I have watched pretty much every video now including Extractions&Ire. They have reminded me why I ever studied chemistry: explosions, poisons and drugs.
Yeah doesn't sound too healthy now thinking back...
But hell, went on to become a Biotech engineer and there are som pretty radical things going on there too, gene editing and stuff. Maybe more revolutionary at the moment but it's not really in your face in the same way as a good ol' explosion.
Well here i am, as a project manager doing fuck all with any of that, but getting payed well. So just became your 666th Patreon, why the hell not.
What’s your favorite not-in-ur-face biochem breakthrough that nobody really talks about?
@@ToriKo_ I also want to know this
@@ToriKo_ the thought emporium youtube channel does alot of gene editing videos that are quite eye opening on whats possible these days
Well aren't you lucky.
I love your content, glad you're back
This is the holiday gift we all needed.
Thanks for the Christmas present Ex&F!
When saw you put ozone in that 90% hydrogen peroxide, I was like "should I be wearing my safety googles in order to watch that ?"
face shield required for viewing
@@ExplosionsAndFire with goggles underneath!! A face shield should not be used for primary eye protection
Safety squints, goggles, face shield, two condoms, and your mother on speed dial.
Might as well be wearing a suit of power armour if you play with h2o3
TH-cam creators really do not get enough credit for their contributions to science education and outreach. I hope at some point organizations like ACS take notice and throw some funds into supporting these channels. When I have a shit day in lab, It is humbling to come back and watch a video of you synthesizing cubane in a shed with pool chemicals. On top of this, you manage to do it while making the video genuinely entertaining and accessible to everyone. Like holy shit, the dedication is unmatched. I have huge respect for you, and content like this reminds me how much I love what I do.
Thanks for all of your awesome content and best of luck with your PhD!
I think back to my younger years, when information came only as fast as I could read, write, take notes and walk back and forth to the library. Now we can tune it to countless other problem solvers, to share and learn with, that for quite a while just did not exist in my world!
Nah the scientific community is to focused on only funding programs that can make them more money, monopolize colleges or get more woke or focused on green greed (climate science) or going “green”
@@stormbreaker170 This is not the place to attempt to invalidate climate science lol
@@stormbreaker170 I also wish universities didn't spend money on trying to stop climate change and reduce our reliability on the finite supply of crude oil
With money comes influence. It kills the free spirit.
We had an incident at work with some 3rd base H2O2, I think it was like 45%. Container leaked on a girl who wasn't paying a lick of attention to it. Literally right after being briefed on the dangers of hazmat spills. Started melting skin within 5 minutes and started oxidizing the concrete it fell on almost immediately.
I legit feel like some of your channel could be real useful in industrial settings.
I work in liquid rocketry and have used 90% for rockety purposes. With a team won a $1M prize building a hovering peroxide rocket. If you want to make peroxide again consider trying sparging, it is often used rather than vacuum distillation. Dry gas is bubbled through the liquid and will make the water evaporate faster; industrially this is done closed loop with a dryer but for a small batch you could do it open loop with a nitrogen tank.
Phosphoric acid is a stabilizer for peroxide, it will poison catalysts. If you want the most reactive HTP, I'd keep it away. You can demonstrate this by putting some silver in peroxide, unstabilized peroxide will bubble until it all reacts, while stabilized peroxide will eventually poison the catalyst and stop reacting.
The main reason normal distillation isn't used isn't just because the peroxide will break down faster, but that peroxide vapor is detonable. There are many stories of people blowing up their glassware trying to distill peroxide. I don't know if there's a good way to demonstrate that, but if anyone can find a way it's you.
HTP will ignite itself on contact with some substances, so if you do this again you might look for some of those rather than doing ones you have to light. Pine cones are quite reactive. Leather is very reactive, dripping some peroxide on shoes is a common way to demonstrate why you have to have the proper PPE. Hydrazine hydrate is hypergolic with HTP, as are a few other strange fuels.
@Dark stole your comment
Is it possible to use molecular sieves?
@@windowsxp7460 That's some weird shit.
@@Beregorn88 I don't know, I haven't tried it. Usually they're used in very different molecules, like alcohol vs. water. Peroxide is close enough in size to water that I don't think the usual 4 angstrom sieves would work.
@@bbrockert Armadillo AeroSpace ?
I've used lots of H202 for my plants actually, it's great!
It kills soil dwelling pests, and can also revive dying plants by giving oxygen to the root zone. Had an orange tree I was sure to be dead, so I tried the H202. A week later I started seeing shoots from the root zone, I was utterly amazed. H202 is a great tool for gardeners 👍
Wow ok people actually do use it for plants. Interesting
@@ExplosionsAndFire yeah it has lots of uses. I was as surprised as you when I learned it could benefit my plants. Great to see you back posting!
What concentration do you use for treating plants?
Unfortunately here in Germany anyone asking for Hydrogenperoxide more concentrated than 5% or so is considered a terrorist trying to make a bomb. Sellers are even obliged to report suspicious customers. So always shave before buying chemical supplies.
@@MetalheadAndNerd
I wouldn't think it would be much higher than 5%.
Granted, this is also the first I am hearing of this. From my own ventures into soil chemistry, I would caution a bit against too much oxygen in the soil.
But that gets into a whole enormous field of study of soil types, plant root systems, chemistry, etc. For example, my blueberries can't survive in alkaline soil - they can't absorb nutrients in the soil without it being fairly acidic. Other plants do just fine in alkaline soil - mulberries, for example, are quite happy in alkaline soil and tend to make it more so. Strawberries prefer acidic soil, blackberries don't care and some varieties are downright invasive... Legumes have a bacteria companion which fixes large amounts of nitrogen to the soil (nitrates) from nitric acid in the rain (which is why catalytic converters are a mistake - that is plant food we are destroying at a time when the rains are becoming less nutritious). But that actually can make the soil too nitrogen rich and will impair or even kill tomatoes/solanacae family plants (eggplant, tobacco, nightshade, potatoes). Garlic and onions release a chemical that kills that bacterium.
My point is that dumping peroxide on your soil is probably a situational or niche treatment.
@@Aim54Delta 5% ist enough to completely bleach black mold within less than a minute so I would assume that this concentration is pretty aggressive to organic material.
I was just googling this topic yesterday and then you release this! Tom, for some reason I find your channel oddly relaxing, not sure that I should given the topics lol. Keep up the great work!
Sir, you have the best knives of the world.
@@gustavobroglio5873 Thanks you Gustavo!
You're relaxing because the back of your mind knows that you're watching this video *because* he survived.... (At least that's the only way I can find to rationalize it) :P
Why were you googleing concentrating peroxide?
@@andersjjensen lol yes that might be why! It's just also really obvious that he's having a lot of fun, and you have to love seeing that!
12:53 It's because you need the ions from H2O. I remember a story told by a professor about grad students who broke a bottle of concentrated acid on a linoleum floor. They thought the best thing was to dilute it with water. When they poured the water onto the spilled acid, the acid began reacting vigorously with the flooring.
It's generally not a good idea to pour water into concentrated acid period. The best thing to do in that situation would be to neutralize it with a base, such as sodium bicarbonate.
@@Owen_loves_Butters A closet with 1 gallon of fuming concentrated acid, how many mols do you think you would need of that sodium bicarbonate? And how many mols of CO2 is going to be produced? What do you think their chance of survival is? They will pass out face first into a pool of acid and die of asphyxiation. Good thinking, genius.
@@Owen_loves_Butters would the reaction with base not form water?
@@fgvcosmic6752 It would, but the acid would react with the base more than anything else present, say the floor. If there's enough base to neutralize the acid, the floor might not even get damaged much at all.
@@gregoryford2532 Carbonic acid is not stable and would rapidly break down almost entirely into water and carbon dioxide. Any common base, such as any alkali hydroxide, alkali carbonate, or alkali bicarbonate, will form water when reacted with most acids.
"I'm gonna use an analagy... baseball"
Me, who knows nothing about baseball: "Well at least I have a chemistry degree and already know how peroxide works"
Yeah, but please someone explain that 7th base is
@@yshwgth it's when you shid your pants in the dugout with your whole team after a win
Lol I've been to third base lots of times and one day hope to make it to home base.
Checkmate, nerds.
In typical Aussie fashion, he attempts to use the baseball bat to play cricket.
I remember as a kid getting some 50% H2O2 for my birthday, loads of fun :) One of the first things I did was put way too much in a volumetric flask (Yeah, I know, I was a kid, and it was one of the two treasured pieces of second hand "proper" glassware I owned), then dump a bunch of manganese dioxide in it to see how vigorously it would decompose compared to the 3% I'd previously experimented with. The answer was very. Everyone's seen the "elephant's toothpaste", but this was more the "elephant's boiling explosive diarrhea". I sometimes wonder if the stains are still on the roof of my childhood shed/lab...
Your poor mother
@@johnsch8634 F for respect lol
Did your neighbor the next town over return the flask to you after finding it in his yard?
When I was kid, the sodium in the lab was dirty so asked the tech "can I wash this with water"?
Everyone in the lab looked at me with a dreadful stare
Do it lol
Daily reminder that Tom does a PhD in the forbidden department, physics. Now he can finally prove it's not real.
Yeah that's why it's taking so long. Physics isn't real
@@ExplosionsAndFire I can't wait for the paper "Physics isn't real" Chemistry just tends to use it sometimes.
PhDeznutz!
@@ExplosionsAndFire I knew it!
The three enemies of the chemist: hydrofluoric acid, osmium tetroxide and *the physics department*
4:53 Fun language fact: East Asian languages also got a suffix for element names, and it is used like '-ium' in many English element names. In Korean/Japanese Oxygen (with its etymology related to 'acid producer') becomes 'san(acid)-so' - with its 'acid' part being a homonym with the word 'mountain'. Meanwhile, in Korean the suffix 'so' also has a homonym; it is '*cow*'. Ergo, 'spherical oxygen in a vacuum' written in Korean pays better respect to its reference than the original English phrase; it's a homonym to 'a spherical *mountain cow* in a vacuum'.
also carbon is a homonym to 'burnt cow', hydrogen to 'bull(male cow)', and nitrogen to '*vagina* cow'.
Ammonia is a foursome.
why do people have to have indigenous words for everything. not meant to offend u germans do the same. what the actual fk is "wasserstoff" just say hydrogen
@@CimboAkinci the German chemical industry was for a long time the largest in the world, until they fucked over their reputation, so you could ask why we don't call it wasserstoff in English.
hi korean😄
@@CimboAkinci boy do I have news to tell you about every single non-technical word
@@Melonist yea but u would expect the chemical names to be universal. just like the metric system
It's nice to see he plays baseball exactly like he does chemistry. 100 misses before a small, yet entertaining and impressive hit. Lol
lol that's how I live
Standard R & D rates...😱🙇🏻🥳
2:17 "In addition to [the main rocket] propellants, there were other tanks filled with hydrogen peroxide. [This] substance was similar to the hydrogen peroxide that you might find in any medicine cabinet, however the concentration of our peroxide was 50 times that of the peroxide for household use. That stuff was really volatile. It was comparable to nitroglycerine in terms of instability.
The older mechanics used to impress the new mechanics by throwing a cup full of that peroxide on a sagebush. The bush would explode in flames. One good quality of hydrogen peroxide is that it gives a warning before it explodes. It gets hot and gives off a pungent odor. When we smelled hot peroxide, we got the hell out of there" - Milton Thompson in At the Edge of Space (p. 75), referring to the high-test peroxide used by the X-15 for its reaction control system and APUs.
If you like stories about chemistry in that vein I can highly recommend "Ignition" by John D. Clarke. It's about all the different (insane) kinds of rocket fuel people have experimented with throughout the history of rockets. And it is fucking hilarious!
@@andersjjensen Can second that recommendation, it definitely deserves its reputation!
@@andersjjensen And what's funny is with all that exotic chemistry, the real workhorse in getting us to space now is Kerosene and Oxygen.
@@andersjjensen I LOVE THAT BOOK! Ha, my teenage nephews got a huge kick out of it too!
@@Dr_Mauser Well all the new players use methane and oxygen because it has better specific impulse. The space shuttle used hydrogen and oxygen which has even better specific impulse, but liquid hydrogen is "financially troublesome". But a lot of what was learned is still used in other applications than main thrust. Many reaction control thrusters still use the hydrazine derivatives for instance. Emergency power is still generated with hydrogen peroxide, etc. But a lot of that shit is simply to dangerous to handle by the hundreds of tons...
This one time, I bought a commercially-available ozone generator for deodorizing rooms. (This one used a UVC lamp in a metal enclosure to generate the ozone, rather than high voltage). Somewhere along the line, I *seriously* fucked up the math, and ended up with an ozone generator that was built for a room ten times the size of the ones I was deodorizing.
My point is that I understood exactly what you meant by the radiation thing. If you ask me, high concentrations of ozone smell exactly like what they're doing chemically: they smell like they're oxidizing (translation: chemically burning) the lining of your nasal cavity.
Worked with a Co-60 sterilizer array, when the elements were out of the water doing their work killing everything in the bunker the whole building would reek of ozone death even with strong forced ventilation
We use an ozone generator (i believe) in the ER to decontaminate Covid rooms (rooms that held a covid patient). I love the smell personally 😂😂😂 probably not a good thing.
If i have time, and a previous smelly patient experience, I’ll deodorize the room with it just cause
At low concentrations it's a pleasant smell , like after a thunderstorm.
I don't understand basically any of this, but I loved chemistry in high school, and this guy is absurdly entertaining
I've spent the last week being lazy not taking of my own shit but just seeing you do your thing motivates me to keep working on my own! Thanks for the motivation and the amazing Chemistry content I love it man!!
You've got this!
@@ExplosionsAndFire ohhh shitee. Is that what Austrailians say idk m8 😁 you too with the PhD boss can't wait to see what you cook up
I love Australian and UK based accents cause of how much the slang makes it sound unprofessional lol. You just have an Australian doctorate-level chemist going "aw fuck, my benzine's munted." It's a lovely contrast.
👏 😂
@@dmacpher I'm in the UK. I crashed my bike the other day, twice, and had to go to the doctor (the next day).
When I told him I'd crashed my bike twice on the same day he actually said 'Fuck off!??'
It was the funniest and most unprofessional comment I've ever heard from a doctor and made me lol 😂
One of my favorite compounds. For years I have concentrated it by putting 3% H2O2 into a beaker and submerging it in a crock pot full of 60ºC water. Gently evaporate the water off of it. Wondered for years why the metal tools in the garage around it were rusting...
Do you still makes meal in it?
@@BacklTrack Usually you'll retire one or buy an old one from a flea market and use it specifically for non-edible projects.
I called my homemade ozone generator “the death box”. That thing could totally eliminate any smell in any room no matter how strong
I love you're quote of "ozone smells like a lethal dose of radiation feels." Got a few good kicks of 16% ozone in the face in grad school. Cures hangovers. Opening an O3 bar in Vegas.
Used an industrial Ozone machine to deodorize a house a few times.
I may have been careful, but even after the air cleared it was a bizarre smell.
I got a whiff of it when messing about with high voltage arcs. I ran out the room 🤣
@@kennethsmith5383 I think it's a nice smell after it clears, like a lush forest with a hint of sweetener, while simultaneously being sterile
@@ephjaymusic I'd be more afraid of the electricities to be honest, I struggled for about 3 years to get to 16% and all it did was oxidize the iron in my bloodstream so I spit up a little rust.
@@thebrozone3896 oh gosh! That's freaky! 🤣
Ah, concentrated hydrogen peroxide. I was using some of that back in uni and didn't realize I had a small tear in my glove. I ended up with a bleached fingertip. I didn't even feel it at the time, but boy did it itch while healing. And that was no where near rocket fuel levels!
Nice
Been there. It doesn’t really hurt but man the itch and dryness is something.
were you making some forbidden terrorism powder lol?
"most chemist won't ever make it to 4th base" too real :(
The same is true for most physicists 😪
do biochemist have chance?
@@IAOIceland1984 biochemist don't even go to second base
If you get more than 100% peroxide you get to start over from 0 with prestige
Yeah, but if you burn the 100% you create a bomb
"...unless we wanted to do something a little more d a n g e r o u s"
Mate, this is the content I'm here for.
Awesome vid, loved it!
I was so impressed about the 95% purity, which not even rockets use as 70% is good enough for an oxidizer + pressure source, that when he was like "Let's make H2O3" I was in disbelief
In undergrad lab we made a really cool complex that models galactose oxidase and can selectively oxidize an alcohol to an aldehyde. As a byproduct hydrogen peroxide gets generated. It was possible to do this reaction in a pure alcohol that corresponds to a volatile aldehyde (methanol for example) and generate water free H2O2. If anyone wants to see the structure, here is the SMILES: CC(C)(C)C1=CC(N2C3=C(O[Cu]2([N](CC)(CC)CC)O4)C(C(C)(C)C)=CC(C(C)(C)C)=C3)=C4C(C(C)(C)C)=C1 one Oxygen is a ketyl-radical.
Do you have the paper reference?
@@LuisBorja1981 I will dig it up later. My prof was actually in the group that made it and the patent got sold to degussa, one of the biggest producers of H2O2 (in Germany?). But it seems like it doesn't get used in industry.
Fuck me, that's a lot of Carbons.
Leaving a comment so I can find this later, this seems real interesting
thats a lot of tert butyl
A tip I have learned. I am far from a chemist but I work with 40 percent peroxide for work. It likes to decompose to oxygen and water with heat and uv. So perhaps keeping it cool and dark would speed up drying?
We’re working on making a HTP (98% peroxide) and RP1 (refined kerosene) fueled rocket in my university’s liquid rocket club. Cool to see what goes into making higher concentrations. I’m glad we can just buy our stuff and not have to make it, granted it is expensive af
That's super cool! What's the handling procedure like for the 98% peroxide?
@@ExplosionsAndFire "The first, and absolutely most indispensable, piece of safety equipment you'll mount is a pair of well fitting high traction running shoes."
@@andersjjensen I will draw your attention to a quote “It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants
Alas I can't remember exactly what the chemical was though I do recall its a yellow abomination. And one of the most horrific chemicals known to man.
@@daveharrison4697 Ah, that passage was in relation chlorine tri-fluoride. Definitely one of the highlights of that book!
@@JcPepin That's the badger! Absolutely horrific stuff. Anything that can set fire to concrete and asbestos on contact is NOT your friend. Oh, and glass too I believe...
I can relate to the phosphorus pentoxide issues, especially here in Australia.
It's sometimes carried by ceramic & pottery supply houses.
@@S730SD really? What do they use it for? Sounds way more dangerous than you would want for just making pottery!
A really scuffed way of concentrating the peroxide would be to run the ozone generator through the low percentage peroxide. Therefore producing more total peroxide than you started with.
Better yet pour straight up ether in it so it separates out and possibly explodes. Can't test it because I just huff the ether 👍🏻
@@dc-gs3ld ACTUALLY - wait a minute bucko that'd actually work for vacuum distillation. As long as it can stay cool, Ether and Salt can be used to separate out water and hydrogen peroxide for ether distillation. That would actually work really well, like 80% - 90% concentration well.
Scuffed strategy FTW 👍
@@sulli1189 could you explain to us non-chemists what you're talking about. Because to me it sounds like you're planning to mix a fuel (ether) with a oxidizer (peroxide) in a reaction that can create heat.
@@caseyb1346 I've never heard of anyone doing it because it's insane but it should make the peroxide form a layer outside of the water, the problem is after that happens it would possibly form a hypergol or some other horrifying thing, apparently in an environment with no oxygen it wouldn't be a problem but it's still, a disturbing thought
@@caseyb1346 YES! You are correct and That's why it's Scuffed. You don't want to do this.
Though in Hypothesis I'm pretty sure the ignition wouldn't be instant and the method could work if kept under ether/alcohol's ignition temperature as well as the peroxide's decomposition temperature.
The Salt however is unknown to be an inhibitor or catalyst. The hope is that instead of removing the water through expensive/long acting "desiccants" (water absorbing compounds), We could instead instantly separate a majority of the water by changing it's buoyancy due to the fact that saltwater and alcohol act like water and oil and so separate from each other. That's an old trick for concentrating alcohol but it makes the alcohol salty.
That method only makes sense because the combination of Hydrogen Peroxide being more soluble in Alcohol and ether -Plus that Alcohol and Ether can be distilled faster than water at a lower temperature. It wouldn't be the purest if it works, but it would be a fast way to concentrate a portion of the peroxide into the 80's and 90's range as the alcohol will also be in the 90% using the salt method.
It's honestly safer to concentrate the peroxide by making more of it, but if this method works it would be Fast. I hope that I got this down in proper laymen because it's how I prefer to explain this stuff.
Edit: After a bit of reading, Hydrogen peroxide should be safely soluble in chilled Alcohol and Ether, It apparently isn't Hypergolic and requires a catalyst of pure metals or organic phosphoric compounds (like cell wall lipids) to react as such. Salt also seems to be neutral to hydrogen peroxide but that's more anecdotal.
This may not be as scuffed as I had first thought...
The best part is the clueless friend that pushes you to go further without even realizing what you are doing. The type of person who will happily take credit for your accomplishments for being your inspiration...so they kinda deserve it. A friend you don't like but can never hate
so glad you started uploading again, and hopefully a lot more too! idk how you dont have millions of subs yet, literally the best science youtuber on the whole website.
For some reason chemistry is not that popular, I guess having a death wish is part of the ritual.
hey vsauce, Michael here..no offence to ex&f.
he's back! my favourite insane Australian chemist. That "sugar in piranha solutions" scares me on a spiritual level though
It should.
Piranha is scary stuff.
He's been back for a while on his other channel.
@@The_Keeper nah, the fish are just bitey chicken popcorn in the American river ecology.
I showed my aunt, an actual chemist, your videos. She loved them, she found them hilarious
"an actual chemist" is either a completely normal description of your aunt or a very passive aggressive dig at E&F lmao
@@squ1dd13 it’s the former, for real
@@SuperCrazf yeah ik, but i just find the different interpretations funny
I can assure you. At least half my class of chemistry bachelor students watch this channel for fun
"I think you can still go to third base in Europe if you've got a licence but I don't know" is perhaps the single best ex+f quote ever, likewise 'most chemists will never make it to 4th base'
This channel is my all time favourite and has been for a while, so congratulations on your PHD…funding!
As someone with crippling ADHD this is exactly how my brain works. And it's cool to listen to someone talk at my pace lol
Yo. I identify with that.
Honestly that's how Aussies speak
as an aussie with adhd you're both right
Yeah. Some ADHD friends and I were going to take over the world, came up with an outline of a plan. And everything. Then we figured out that it was I who had forgetten the chips. Benzo was gonna' bring dip but found something far more interesting. We debated that for a while. This is a cool channel!
Same
A chemistry show has no right being that funny.
You’re an Incredible Mad Genius.
Thank you from the nameless hoards of chemistry deamons for the Time and Sanity you spend giving us excellent content.
I Love the dedication to “The Bit”. Follow it through til The End.
As a grad student working in a propulsion lab I've heard the horror stories and seen the footage of catastrophic failed tests using 89% peroxide in hybrid motors. That stuff is no joke, and I'm a little glad I'm not handling it!
They used to have a rocket powered interceptor using 90% of this. The me 163, the stories of that dissolving pilots is frightening
The Black Arrow rocket burned kerosene and H2O2
I missed ya buddy.
When I feel down in the lab, I put on a video of you and I can feel happy that:
A. I don't have to work with whatever abomination you are cooking.
B. Start to reappreciate my PPE and fume hood.
C. See that even when a situation is confusing, determination is often the key to succes.
It takes skill to play the clown of the circus. You're appreciated👍🏻
Glad you're back! We missed you! You had me at the beginning tho, I thought you were PHinisheD
Is great to be back here!
I thought he was Australian not Finnish
@@TomGibson. Well, he is insane enough to be Finnish. :D
I was a bit nervous watching that xylene burning on top of the high strength peroxide. Flammable solvents which are miscible with the peroxide are one thing, but those that float on top of it are a completely different story. I'll let the venerable old John Drury Clark (author of Ignition!) explain why:
"A broken missile on deck - or any sort of shipboard accident that
brought fuel and acid together - would inevitably start a fire. On the other hand, they reasoned that jet fuel wouldn't even mix with peroxide, but would just float on top of it, doing nothing. And if, somehow, it caught fire, it might be possible to put it out - with foam perhaps - without too much trouble.
So, at NARTS we tried it. A few drums of peroxide (about 55
gallons per drum) were poured out into a big pan, a drum or two of JP-4 was floated on top, and the whole thing touched off. The results were unspectacular. The JP burned quietly, with occasional patches of flare or fizz burning. And the fire chief moved in with his men and his foam and put the whole thing out without any fuss. End of exercise.
The Lord had his hands on our heads that day - the firemen, a
couple of dozen bystanders, and me.
For when we - and other people - tried it again (fortunately on a
smaller scale) the results were different. The jet fuel burns quietly at first, then the flare burning starts coming, and its frequency increases. (That's the time to start running.) Then, as the layer of JP gets thinner, the peroxide underneath gets warmer, and starts to boil and decompose, and the overlying fuel is permeated with oxygen and peroxide vapor. And then the whole shebang detonates, with absolutely shattering violence."
Of course a few mL in a petri dish is probably not going to cause a huge explosion. But if it did detonate, it would be enough to shatter the dish and send broken glass flying at high velocity in unpredictable directions. So still not to be sniffed at!
"Sometimes you get so caught up in avoiding bad scenarios and surviving a procedure, that you don't actually stop and think, "what is the good scenario?"" I laughed so hard.
And when he started trying to make H2O3 I was like, "Oh, this man wants to die."
Cheers for giving me something INTERESTING to watch on TH-cam. This is the first really good vid I have watched for years. Great channel and fantastic experiments. I have a DIY vaccum chamber and some 11% peroxide, and I wanna do a project with my daughter where we purify it and use it for elephants toothpaste (and some other stuff). I have conc sulphuric acid, epsom salts, and I suppose I could dry out loads of copper sulphate and try that as a dessicant. I'm looking forward to testing the purity too. Thanks again, mate. VERY entertaining and informative. (EDIT - sorry found the answer to my question. You already answered it, and I wasn't paying attention).
You have no idea how many interrogatons my chem teachers have undergone thanks to the chaos/work of this man. I am banned from brining up the name Jahn Teller (shiller of metals)
interrogaton, the hypothesized spin-42 quantum particle of the wtf field
as a huge baseball fan the swings you took at the end of the video before you brought out the cricket bat basically made my day
Ah damn, I thought your line about P2O5 being expensive would lead into showing us how you can source it cheaply (like what you did with CCl4; "impossible to get... I found some"). 😭
I wish!!
Fun fact Sodium polyacrylate superabsorbent (SAP) absorb 30% H2O2, i tested it then forgot about the beaker and one month later i was left with a strange goo which i suspected to be highly enriched in Peroxide (dried SAP doesnt do that with simple water).
Fearing it was a fire hazard, i immediatly soaked it with water but i still regret not burning some to test it.
Brings back memories....
Ah, the good old days of the 1990s, before the Department of Homeland Security Theater and its arcane restrictions - "Some quantities, concentrations, and uses of hydrogen peroxide require personnel with special clearance, but you're not allowed to know who needs the special clearance unless you already have the special clearance."
I was working (after a fashion) with a group that was using ~85% peroxide in multi-liter quantities. Start with commercial 50%, bought by the drum-full, and... well, the peroxide guy was using a variety of methods for concentrating the stuff. Last I was involved with the group, he was experimenting with sparging - instead of waiting for the water to evaporate into dry air, the plan was to blow dry air through the liquid to carry off the water. Never thought of blowing dry ozone through it, but he was just crazy enough he might have tried that one had it been suggested.
I seem to recall that there was commercial 85% available at the time, but only in rail-car lots, and the group's budget didn't extend to that sort of quantity, not to mention the trouble and expense of having a rail line run out to the remote test facility.
And, yes, getting a drop of the concentrated stuff on one's skin is painful.
Dude, you must have been making a LOT of TATP! Jk
Security Theater key words!
I miss those days. Was able to get gallons of 35% no questions asked. Worked great for stripping metal from gold using a but of HCl added. Was so much better than alternatives for this task. 🤓
I love your content man. The way you present information is very relatable, understandable and approachable.
Your calling in life is, in my humble opinion, as a teacher. You're amazing at it!
Love it when you don't notice the stoichiometry is wrong for way too long
I just spent the better part of a month diving down rabbit holes while perfecting a current regulating circuit only to return to the main project I built it for and realize I don't need it, so there's that.
A bit of wheel reinventing for the discerning gentleman
I like the moments such as the hail and the snake when Australia asserts itself as a character on this channel.
I've done vacuum distillation at home to over 90% over 20 years ago using an incandescent light bulb as the heat source and starting with 50% food grade H202. Purity and cleanliness are key and it's quite hard to keep 90%+ from decomposing on its own, but the harder challenge is keeping a strong enough vacuum to bring the boiling point down to under 40C.
I made copper carbonate for a video, for the first time in years, and when I went to calculate the final yield I ended up with a greater than 100% yield. Even after drying in a desiccator. I almost uploaded the video the other day to ask what I did wrong until I realized during editing, I made a really stupid and amateur mistake while calculating the stoichiometry.
Needless to say, I'm sticking to practical chemistry until I get back into the chemistry groove lol. I've been doing mycology and biology so much the past few years, my chemistry skills have degraded very badly xb. Oh well.
Just when the world needed him the most, HE FUCKIN RETURNED
congrats on the PhD (funding) and welcome back!
I think 4'th base is 50%, which you can get for agricultural purposes and buy over the counter at hydroponics stores. Same chemical burns as 3'rd base in my experience, with the added fun that if you put it close to a naked flame after a few seconds of heating the naked flame suddenly gets a lot bigger as the H2O2 decomposes. Maybe 5'th base is for HTP
edit: OK 2 minutes later I see you already know this and I'm a dumb dumb
9:14 - Are my shrooms kicking in or are these visual effects....
These are some nice peroxide crystals. Reminds me of chemistry horror stories of the "Things I won't work with" variety (not sure if it was actually there) where the author was explaining how over long stretches of time pure peroxide crystals form in untouched containers, and referenced a story about a few BARRELS of the stuff that were discovered, untouched for a couple of decades and with nice, big crystals floating in them, in a basement in a heavily populated city. That must've been fun.
Although as not a chemist I never fully grasped just how dangerous they are. Shame you didn't have enough concentrated peroxide to grow bigger crystals and show us their energetic nature, but on the other hand I like you being alive m8.
That was a Shake hands with danger from Well theres your problem. I can't quite remember what ti was but yeah.
There was also liquified dog
@@embersaffron5522 i see i have come to the right place!
This is truly one of the most enjoyable chemistry channels to watch on TH-cam, and I watch a lot of chemistry videos. So much so that my friends and family have grown concerned.
10:20 Aw what an adorable boi, just doesn't want to deal with the hail my guy.
2:09 “most chemists won’t make it to 4th base”
That last bit had me crying from laughing so hard. I work with an ozone generator daily so I've become paranoid and smell it even when I'm not at work so that description was fantastic
*claims to not be insane*
*proceeds to make 95% hydrogen peroxide in a shed*
Just pick one, mate. You can't have it both ways.
I recall a person doing that. In the end he did something even worse and got locked up.
Me: "That equation looks sketch" Him: "This equation is nothing but lies"
h2o2, the sequel to the classic hit, water
These videos are 100% worth the wait. I don’t understand how chemistry can be this hilarious lol
The amount of work you put into each intro and your comical ad libs along with carrying the mic like a classic chemist at an event teaching a college course. Your channel is top tier platinum. And also where I've learned to make all sorts of explosives or atleadt the chemistry of :D
As a rocket nerd, even before the video starts I am hyped as hell to watch some High-Test Peroxide chemistry!
Let me share with you _my_ understanding of modern HTP rocketry: back in the day, the U.S. Air Force wanted to know whether it was a suitable propellant, so they put a bunch of it in a sealed container in the middle of the desert, it exploded, and they vowed never to use it again (instead using much safer chemicals like Inhibited Red Fuming Nitric Acid and Nitrogen Tetroxide). The RAF already used peroxide decomposition in rocket-boosted fighter planes, so their only orbital rocket used HTP and Kerosene, a mixture which had the advantage of being hypergolic without being carcinogenic (relatively speaking).
But then Parliament killed that project, the U.S. used Hydrazine and N2O4 until solid rockets became the de-facto western ICBM choice, and then mostly fueled their orbital rockets with kerosene and liquid oxygen, unless they really needed to throw money at either the defense industry (solid rockets) or cryogenics engineers with too much time on their hands (liquid hydrogen). But now we're all transitioning to liquid oxygen and liquid methane, which sounds like a terrible environmental choice until you realize the existing options were 1) kerosene and 2) hydrogen made from cracking methane anyways. And maybe we'll make it via the Sabatier process someday. Promise. Maybe.
EDIT: There I am, Gary, there I am! Also, jesus christ, you want to go even further beyond?
This guy is a perfect mix of chaos and serious science. 10/10
Great video! We are actually concentrating about 100 ml of 85-88% hydrogen peroxide each month in our lab using vacuum distillation (personally, I've been oxidizing some electron deficient tetrazines lately). It is pretty safe if you use a thermostat to keep everything below 50 degrees C. Greetings from Russia
We learned a Russian day is quite long in this video. How long has a Russian month to be ;)
My dad send me this video to watch since I’m doing a chemistry related degree currently. So interesting yet comedic. I’m so surprised you’re not in the millions when it comes to followers!
The formula for Hydrogen Trioxide is also the noise you make when you first see it.
The noise you should be making when reading "Hydrogen Trioxide" off the label on a random bottle in the lab should be "FUCK!" :P
Took that thought right out of my head lol
you’re too authoritarian
@@kenopsia9013 yeah probably
my grandmother works at a hydrogen peroxide purification plant, they have 4 vacuum distillers. they ship out train takers full of 99% pure hydrogen peroxide
"I was only gonna take 50% of your chemicals so you wouldn't notice"
#FreeNileGreen
This makes some distillation prep work I did as a TA in highschool seem way more dangerous than I realized.
As a 3d animator who knows diddly squat about chemistry, I gotta admit I watched every single one of your videos and regret nothing. You dumb it down to keywords even I understand and when thing go boom it makes me happy. Really love the content. Glad you're back. Keep up that good shite mate 👌